Diane Cairns sent her assistant to drag a desk chair from the office next door when Mimi Polk showed up in the spring of 1989 with the new, unknown screenwriter. Callie Khouri cut an unusual figure in jeans and a pair of red Tony Lama cowboy boots with butterflies tooled on the sides. The agent, always outfitted in a uniform of three-inch pumps with a tailored dress or skirt and jacket, had never seen cowboy boots before in a professional setting. She masked any reaction with a proper game face.
As an agent for writers, not top directors or stars, Diane didn’t command one of the offices with commodious seating areas belonging to ICM colleagues like Joe Funicello, who represented Jodie Foster, or Ed Limato, who handled Mel Gibson and Michelle Pfeiffer. It was Diane’s strategy to slip these sorts of luminaries the script for Thelma & Louise. From there, it was a question of maneuvering it around the Hollywood game board, into the sight lines of people at the studios and, God willing, onto the screen.
Like everyone else who’d heard about the script, Diane had a far-from-promising introduction to it. She’d gotten the tip when she was on the phone about something else with Sue Williams, a development assistant at Ridley Scott’s company. “The writer is looking for an agent,” Williams said. She didn’t mention that Mimi had run it by others who had already passed. “Do you want to read it?”
For Diane, the answer to that question was always yes. She read ten or twelve scripts every weekend, lying in the sun on the Santa Monica beach. Sometimes she set her alarm for 5 a.m. to bulldoze through a couple more before she headed to the gym and office. Other times she read scripts while she brushed her teeth. Diane’s job was to represent screenwriters, but more important, she sought out material that kept work flowing for the rest of the agency, wading through a slag heap of available scripts and plucking the jewels that might make magic for the directors and stars and studio bosses on high.
She read Thelma & Louise reclining in bed before sunup in her Westwood condo, her mind fresh but half asleep. It jolted her awake as nothing had in years, although she had enough experience to understand the hurdles. “At the time, everything was all-male, action-driven,” she says. “Even if you had a male-female script, it was the kiss of death.” On the other hand, “I had youthful ignorance on my side,” she says. “I liked it because I liked it.”
Diane surmised that Mimi had tagged along to the meeting because she wasn’t willing to let her discovery out of her sight. If all went well, this would be Ridley’s first time producing for another director, and Mimi’s first as a coproducer, but Callie needed an agent to sell the script to a studio that was willing to foot the bill.
Diane opened by praising the writer’s work. Callie let the welcome words wash over her but didn’t allow them to breach her defenses. She quickly laid down her ground rules, and they were cocky for a rank beginner: guarantees that the ending wouldn’t be changed, that she would have the opportunity to direct and that when a studio signed on, it would pay half a million dollars for the screenplay, an aggressive figure during a time when only a few scripts reached such heights. “I remember thinking how distinctive Callie was,” Diane says. “At a time when most women had been conditioned to be more reserved, she had no problem plowing right in there. She didn’t even know how long the odds were. Mimi knew a little bit.”
Diane said she’d try, but Callie would have to get real about her ambition to direct. Only two women the year before had made top-fifty movies, including Penny Marshall, as the director of Big, and none the year before that. “It was a no-brainer,” Diane recollects. “At that time, women weren’t directing movies. It was stacking the deck too much on top of the two female leads.”
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CALLIE SWALLOWED HARD and gave it a couple days before she signed on. From there the task of getting Thelma & Louise out of the starting gate would fall to Diane and Mimi, two women who had landed jobs on the business side of movies, most of them serving others by vetting stacks of raw material, one of the few Hollywood jobs that gave women a way in.
“You’re never going to be an agent here,” Diane had been assured in 1980, when she started as a xerox girl at a smaller agency. “I was this cupcake,” she says looking back. “It made sense to me.” Growing up in the sixties and seventies, she hadn’t expected doors to be open to her, despite her business degree from USC. “You could be a teacher, a nurse or a housewife,” she says. “We were still in the shadows of the big revolutions—the drugs, the Pill, Vietnam. I was the only woman in my college business classes. I sound like an old codger, but it didn’t start to change until the mid-eighties.”
When one of her first bosses told her she was too pretty to be taken seriously, her comeback was to laugh and say, “I’ll scar my face.”
In 1985, she traded up to the literary department of the industry giant ICM. Female agents there were still fairly rare, prized as nurturers, able to coddle and keep the clients happy, although there were exceptions, like Sue Mengers, a fireball who’d won a preeminent place in the seventies on pure bravado. Diane walked a middle line, rigorously competent, speaking in a kind of business staccato. “Everybody thinks they should be wearing white gloves when they walk into your office,” a colleague told her. She scored some important victories before Thelma & Louise crossed her path, partly by exercising judgment that ran against the grain. Diane had sniffed out the script for the sexual thriller Fatal Attraction for the director Adrian Lyne, an important ICM client. She also played a part in placing the period drama Dangerous Liaisons with a studio and getting the script to Michelle Pfeiffer.
Diane didn’t wind up on the right side of every call. Back when she was a pup agent at her first job, she read the script for what would become 1983’s multiple-Oscar winner Terms of Endearment. “Honestly,” Diane told her boss, “I don’t know who wants to see a movie with two women bitching at each other for two hours.”
“It was a complete whiff,” she says. The next time she was handed a script about two fully formed difficult but funny women, she vowed to take off the white gloves.
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FOR MIMI POLK, Callie’s script represented a chance to break into a higher echelon. Mimi had worked primarily as a D-girl, short for development girl, the accepted industry term for the mostly female workforce in the bottom tier of studio or production jobs. Most D-girls had graduated from good colleges, often with literature degrees. If asked, they could probably parse the meager parallels between The Count of Monte Cristo and Rambo, but mostly they read piles of submissions so they could pass the best contenders along to higher-ups. For years, D-girl was by far the most common and, outside of secretarial work, often the only job for women at studios, recognition that they were smart enough to identify good material but not to greenlight pictures or manage their production. A few, including Sherry Lansing and Paula Weinstein, had parlayed the role into more-responsible jobs.
Mimi, whose father had been president and CEO of MGM in New York briefly in the 1960s, had apprenticed in theater and made in-house corporate films before looking for work in London. In one memorable interview for a D-girl job, a movie executive she already knew asked if she would be interested in auditioning for the mermaid role in Splash.
“You mean as a topless mermaid?” Mimi answered, masking her incredulity. “I’m not an actress. I want to be a producer.”
No job was forthcoming, and when she got up and turned her narrow frame toward the door, the executive said, “Have you gained weight?”
“No,” she replied.
“Because your ass got really big.”
It was a relief to meet Ridley, who often put women in charge of his administrative dealings. “I found the best man for the job, and it turned out to be a woman,” he was fond of saying. “I treat women like one of the guys. They treat me like one of the girls. I’ve never had a problem, and I never understand that bullshit.” After five years in Ridley’s employ, Mimi moved to LA in 1988 to run his office there. She hired a D-girl of her own.
Fair-haired, with pale blue eyes and fine, close-set features, Mimi invariably looked well turned out in flat shoes, with not a scrap of makeup. She could be secretive around the office to protect her interests, excluding her D-girl from meetings, and deployed a strictly composed personality and clipped way of speaking that made her emotions hard to read. “One of the best ways for a woman to succeed as a producer or anything else,” she says, “is to be a defuser of drama.”
Mimi calculated that producing the improbable screenplay by Callie Khouri, such a departure from her boss’s usual métier, would show off his range and enhance his career as well as her own. “Not many scripts came his way, because everyone thought of him as a big-action sci-fi director,” says Mimi. “For drama, there were maybe thirty or forty directors in front of him in line. That’s why it was a real gem to find Thelma & Louise.”
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IT HAD TO COMPETE for her boss’s attention with other pressing priorities. By the time Ridley read the script in the spring of 1989, he had taken some punches. His 1985 release, Legend, a dark fantasy with goblins and unicorns, had tanked despite ravishing visuals and the casting of a fledgling Tom Cruise. Someone to Watch Over Me, a 1987 romance about a cop who falls for a woman he is assigned to protect, met a similar fate. In 1989, he was wrapping up Black Rain, a cop melodrama starring Michael Douglas and set primarily in a rain-slicked, neon-lit Japan, but Fox had snubbed him for the sequel to Alien, turning to James Cameron instead. The producer Joel Silver was courting Ridley to make an elaborate special-effects action film called Isobar that Mimi nicknamed Alien on a Train, but it went without saying that another futuristic mayhem-in-transit project would hardly have represented a creative leap forward.
Meanwhile, by some measures Ridley’s younger brother was eclipsing him. Tony had also moved from commercials to movies and shot to the top of the A-list with his second film, 1986’s Top Gun, the Tom Cruise fighter-jet action extravaganza, which earned an astounding $357 million worldwide. He had caught the attention of the movie’s producers, the action impresarios Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, with a fast-cutting commercial that pitted a Saab 900 against a jet, both of them sleek, fast and turbocharged under the camera’s besotted caress. Beverly Hills Cop II, another huge hit for Simpson-Bruckheimer, kept the team soaring into another collaboration, the Tom Cruise NASCAR spectacle, Days of Thunder. In all three, a few sexy women ceded the center of attention to the relationships that really counted among competitive men.
People in the business started to define the brothers in opposition to each other: Tony, the embodiment of the decade with his flair for high-concept action movies, the critics be damned; Ridley, the master of moody artistry, bent on success but steering clear of obvious commercial choices.
Coworkers warmed to Tony’s sociability in contrast to Ridley’s restraint. “Ridley is like a wizard—kind of mysterious and a little rough and a little more difficult, a little less accessible in some ways,” says Susan Sarandon, who worked with Tony on his first film, the stylish vampire chiller The Hunger. “Ridley is more solemn, a man of few, very specific words, compared to Tony, who was bubbly, exuberant, very chatty and not particularly mysterious at all.”
Their opposing personal styles led to very different pictures. While Tony’s appeals to the masses didn’t pretend to aim for gravitas, Ridley’s delved deeper. He always seemed to strive for something more that he might not be able to put into words, at risk of leaving the masses scratching their heads. Ridley often resisted studio pressure for happy endings, while Tony delivered them in slow-motion showers of triumph. Yet Ridley’s wealth and success in the advertising sphere, which continued in tandem with his movies, granted him a kind of superpower strength in insecure Hollywood—he didn’t much care what people thought of him.
“He’s a bull, and I am, too,” Tony once told the Hollywood Reporter. “Nothing takes him down. We have enormous pain resistance.”
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HOWEVER MUCH HE NEEDED A CHANGE, Ridley still couldn’t see himself directing Callie’s story. “It was very much not my thing,” he admits. “I tend to do action-driven things. I love period. This was about women talking about guys and what assholes guys can be.”
Fortunately, he did know the perfect man for the job, someone with box-office clout and a flair for action tempered with comedy. “He was very good with women,” Ridley says. “He could make them really sexy, because he had that kind of rapport with them. And he was hot then, so it would have been made easily.”
Ridley hadn’t yet met with Callie, who so abhorred the treatment of women in eighties blockbusters, but when he did, he planned to tell her that he would offer the job of directing Thelma & Louise to the man responsible for one of the films that offended her most, Beverly Hills Cop II. His hotshot brother Tony Scott.